The "choose dialogue option with your voice" sounds okay, but kind of actually ruined the immersion for me. Since I am doing some of the talking, and Shephard is doing some of the talking, and we're supposed to be the same person.

It'd be different if the tone of my voice steered the conversation, since 90% (made up statistic) is not actually what you say, but how you say it. Having Shephard say all the lines is actually better, since I have a feel for how the writers are steering the conversation and how the NPC are more likely to react.

Yeah, the dialog selection is broken for the exact reasons Evan listed. Suddenly two people are speaking for Shepard. I even play as female Shepard, as the voice acting is far superior there, which breaks the immersion even further.

Voice commands for squad-mates even looks broken. Having to drill down through Person>Action is lame. I should simply state Action and whoever is free for that performs it. Also, it will of course fail you exactly when you need it most. One death caused because Kinect didn't pick up your voice properly relegates the feature to the frustratingly useless garbage pile.

Yeah, the dialog selection if broken for the exact reasons Evan listed. Suddenly two people are speaking for Shepard. I even play as female Shepard, as the voice acting is far superior there, which breaks the immersion even further.

Agree entirely with all of this. I can't watch the video at the moment though to know how well it'll work for squad commands.

The other problem with Kinect support for me though is one of simple logistics. My Kinect is attached to a 360 in a room with a smaller TV and more open space, so that the games can be used to their full potential. Games like Mass Effect I would obviously prefer to play on my main system with a larger TV and better sound system, and I'm not going to carry the Kinect back and forth whenever I want to play ME3, I'll just go without the Kinect features instead.

Well thanks, I'll just park you in the corner and continue on as if playing solo.

Here's to hoping the improved voice recognition in the past decade will help solve this issue.

i was in the military when this came out, and one of our motor sergeants was a puerto rican with a speech impediment (stuttering mostly).... socom was his favorite game, and it was quite hilarious watching (or listening) to him play.

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So how much voice command stuff using Kinect has been adversely affected by audio coming from the game? I haven't gotten a Kinect yet, due to how close I sit to the TV on which I play games. If I get it just for voice control, will I think I've wasted my money?...

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When you setup Kinect it does a calibration routine that profiles your space and its audio properties. It then uses that information to cancel out audio that is being output from the console.

In practice, the tech seems to work pretty well. I've experimented with movies at different volume levels while keeping my voice the same. And recognition stayed consistent until fairly extreme volume levels. I've also tried to use Kinect as my chat input while playing multiplayer. It did cancel out game audio alright but left artifacts in its place and it has no way to remove ambient sounds. Still, an impressive effort but not practical in my opinion.

I don't think Kinect will have any issue recognizing voice commands during Mass Effect gameplay. Of course, if anyone will be using them is a whole other thing.

Thanks. Slickdeals has alerted me to several deals for Kinect at around $100, so I'll start paying more attention to them. I guess I also need to save up for the tin-box edition of ME3. Since I won ME1 in a contest and ME2 was $15 on sale, $80 for ME3 brings the average to a reasonable $32 each...

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Evil intentionally does harm to innocent beings. Good will occasionally do harm to innocent beings, but it's not intentional. Try not to be Evil. Strive to be Good...

Thank god the only kinect features they added were the voice commands.

I've wondered if for some games such as this (especially in the Infiltrator class I prefer) maybe it would work well with optional hand signals to your team. It'd probably be jarring to have to take your hand off the controller to signal to them to flank the enemy or something like that, but no more strange than reading options in your own voice and then hearing it in Shepard's voice.

I wonder how far along in the game that is, and what that Shepard's class is. I'd really like to start ME3 with the Heavy Reave that my Soldier Shepard ended ME2 with, but usually in a game you have to crawl before you run...

LIVE: mikepaul

Evil intentionally does harm to innocent beings. Good will occasionally do harm to innocent beings, but it's not intentional. Try not to be Evil. Strive to be Good...

I wonder how far along in the game that is, and what that Shepard's class is. I'd really like to start ME3 with the Heavy Reave that my Soldier Shepard ended ME2 with, but usually in a game you have to crawl before you run...

I am fairly certain in the demos the show they were playing the stock soldier class.

In all the videos I have seen, the fire rate of the assault rifle seems to have slowed down considerably. Seems like it has gotten slower from each game to the next while the combat mechanics have gotten faster.

That said, the combat looks fine, I just hope they haven't shifted too much of the focus to the combat.

In all the videos I have seen, the fire rate of the assault rifle seems to have slowed down considerably. Seems like it has gotten slower from each game to the next while the combat mechanics have gotten faster.

That said, the combat looks fine, I just hope they haven't shifted too much of the focus to the combat.

Don't see how they could shift any more of the focus to combat than they did in ME2, personally.

In all the videos I have seen, the fire rate of the assault rifle seems to have slowed down considerably. Seems like it has gotten slower from each game to the next while the combat mechanics have gotten faster.

That said, the combat looks fine, I just hope they haven't shifted too much of the focus to the combat.

A couple of things to keep in mind is it is hard to show off the RPG elements in an environment like E3 and given the soldier class is just shooting it can look like they only focused on combat.

In all the videos I have seen, the fire rate of the assault rifle seems to have slowed down considerably. Seems like it has gotten slower from each game to the next while the combat mechanics have gotten faster.

That said, the combat looks fine, I just hope they haven't shifted too much of the focus to the combat.

I haven't seen other vids, but it doesn't seem sped up, enemy movement seems fine - it looks like the turn sensitivity is cranked really high.

I HATE their approach in DA2/ME2 of having the main story as a backdrop to gathering a party full of characters most people really have no intention of using.

I would much rather the game push through a story rather than chopping it up into a bunch of unrelated character specific story lines. Gather your party as you complete the story, the story shouldn't be gathering your party.

Both sequels while offering more polish and possibly better combat (not for me but I can see that argument) felt empty, I had no attachment to the story and I found myself just wanting the games to end already while gathering the last few party members, where as ME1 and DAO were probably my 2 favorite games this generation.

I HATE their approach in DA2/ME2 of having the main story as a backdrop to gathering a party full of characters most people really have no intention of using.

I would much rather the game push through a story rather than chopping it up into a bunch of unrelated character specific story lines. Gather your party as you complete the story, the story shouldn't be gathering your party.

Both sequels while offering more polish and possibly better combat (not for me but I can see that argument) felt empty, I had no attachment to the story and I found myself just wanting the games to end already while gathering the last few party members, where as ME1 and DAO were probably my 2 favorite games this generation.

Completely agree. For DA2, by the time that I was 75% of the way through, I was just ready for the game to be over. Completely different than DA1 where I wanted to keep going...

I HATE their approach in DA2/ME2 of having the main story as a backdrop to gathering a party full of characters most people really have no intention of using.

I would much rather the game push through a story rather than chopping it up into a bunch of unrelated character specific story lines. Gather your party as you complete the story, the story shouldn't be gathering your party.

Both sequels while offering more polish and possibly better combat (not for me but I can see that argument) felt empty, I had no attachment to the story and I found myself just wanting the games to end already while gathering the last few party members, where as ME1 and DAO were probably my 2 favorite games this generation.

In ME2 the story was about getting your teammates. Getting to know them and doing the loyalty missions gave me a better insight into the inner workings of the ME universe. There were several agonizing decisions I had to make in ME2 while I can only think of one or two in ME1 that really seemed to matter.

The Normandy has been taken away from Cerberus in ME3 so it probably does not matter if your crew lived or not.

If Shepard's original crewmates from ME1 and ME2 doesn't matter, then all the crewmates dialogs will change since they are dead. As for the missions, Shepard probably have to take generic crews. I'm more curious how ME3 story plays out if only Shepard and Zaeed/Kasumi are the only ones alive after the Suicide Mission.

As for Normandy, is it still the same ship built by Cerberus or Shepard got someone else to build a new ship as SR3?